1) "Valley of the Dolls" by Jacqueline Susann
The dolls of the title are barbiturates, seconal is red, nembutal yellow, and amytal emerald green, and they seem to be one of the occupational inevitabilities of show business. Before the book is over, and it's told in spansule form over some twenty years, Jon has committed suicide; Neely who has worked her way up to fifty a day dissolved in Scotch, has been in and out of the ""funny farm""; and Anne is just working her way through her first prescription. All three girls start out together in New York and for a few pages it promises to be a Xeroxed copy of Rona Jaffe (without the style). The girls make it Jen as a European sex goddess whose mammary equipment is unbeatable; Neely in Hollywood-- she can sing too; and Anne, quiet, nice Anne who is always in love with one man who picks her up and puts her down, in television. Then there's SEX, and actually not in some time has there been quite so much femme- styled exposure; it's so overstimulated that no wonder these girls need pills. But they go through a lot-- fag husbands, abortions, stomach pumps, sleep cures, cancer, adultery; you name it, they've had it. And even though the message which is encapsulated is that you should tiptoe past the medicine cabinet, the book has been written in the attempt to keep you awake in a numbed sort of condition. The movies promise production; the publishers assure promotion; and there will certainly be a reprint refill along the way.
2) "Just Kids" by Patti Smith
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
3) "The Drowned World" by J.G. Ballard
4) "Nixonland" by Rick Perlstein
In its hardcover format, Nixonland succeeded in telling the complicated story of the 1960s partly through a deft use of narration based on the medium most Americans relied on in that turbulent decade: network TV news reports. This enhanced e-book version replaces the photos illustrating the book with more than 30 contemporary video clips scattered throughout, all made available by CBS News.
The videos, few longer than two minutes and most considerably shorter, cover race riots, anti-war demonstrations, assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention, presidential speeches to the nation and so on. Some of these replace and augment the coverage in Perlstein’s book based on NBC or ABC reports. Others, which Perlstein described in the text, are illuminating: for example, a segment on Stokely Carmichael’s introduction of the establishment-quaking phrase “black power” to the national discussion during an angry demonstration in Mississippi, and Walter Cronkite’s meticulous detailing of what was then known of the Watergate scandal, before Watergate had even become a household word. Despite Perlstein’s claim to CBS News’ Bob Schieffer, in a video introduction to these media enhancements, that these clips “complete” the book, a hard-copy reader of Nixonland probably would not lose much, if anything, from skipping this enhanced version.
Still, anyone who has not already read this essential history of the Nixonization of America, and especially anyone who did not live through the era, would do well to dig into this meaty book in this multimedia format.
5) "Another Country" by James Baldwin
6) "The Group" by Mary McCarthy
Out of the grove of academe (Vassar-'31) into the big world comes the group, with their unassailable self-assurance: they had gone to the very best college (well, Vassar was better than Smith or Wellesley); they had some ennobling notions about being enlightened and interested in higher things; and they had had a very liberal education although in one area it proves to be a little patchy (in spite of stealthy readings in Krafft Ebbing and what the doctors at Vassar had told them)....This is the book which has aroused considerable advance speculation and well it might; it has a tremendous reader recognition (for a few—mottled with indignation) and there cannot be much doubt that Mary McCarthy is an exceptional social satirist, with a jackdaw eye and an infallible ear. Through the seriatim sequence of events as one by one the girls go out to get a job, or a man, or keep him, the book not only achieves its continuity but its mobility of life through the '30's, social, political, professional and personal. From Kay's wedding in the church where her unreal will be held at the close of the book, this goes from one to the next—Dottie and her first experience, stripped to her string of pearls—the totem of good taste; Libby, who had done outstanding themes at Vassar, and now tries to make the literary scene in New York; Polly and her love for a young publisher who is married and in treatment and in conflict between "Fall River and Union Square"; Lakey who goes off to Europe—only on her return, is her sapphic streak apparent to the group who had known her so well in that intimate circle of eight who had lived in South Tower; etc., etc. Certainly here, more than in any of her other novels, there's the evidence that Mary McCarthy can not only impale but move and there's more than a little residual sympathy for those involved. It's a stunning entertainment, with many special effects, the civilized intelligence, the style, the wit. Succès de scandale AND succès d'estime, it's an irresistible combination.
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